Plantagenet Penguinista

While other researchers troll the material properties of ever more exotic substances to find a more efficient solar collector, these two blokes took a slightly different tack. It turns out that the aluminium mylar potato-chip bags that we’ve all seen flashing in the sunlight where some Wrecker tossed them away are — big surprise — excellent reflectors, lightweight, and cheap to make. By making the reflective portions of solar collectors from this stuff, it’s possible to massively reduce the cost of the whole system (they cite a 450W system dropping from USD$3100 to USD$1250). /ME waits with ’bated breath for someone to discover how to run a car on the potato chips, so he can park next to the Salt and Vinegar pump. Newer models, of course, will run on Sweet Thai Thins.

Got to bed late last night (well, early-ish this morning), so I did an unusual thing at the start of my day and dug out the coffee — and some molasses. The molasses supplies some of the things which the caffeols strip out of your system, and it appears to work. At least, many of the symptoms I usually show when hitting the coffee have failed to show on this occasion (a few have, but are a pale shadow of their former selves). The taste, however... ...is odd. Just odd.

I visited the redoubtable Bob Scott (my chiropractor) yesterday in Warwick, and he mentioned that his dialup link between the Warwick clinic and the Como clinic hadn’t been working for a while, with consequent chaos due to doubled-up appointments and such. So I sat down to have a look. The MS-Windows 2000 Professional workstation didn’t show any dialup connections. Hmm. When I create one, the third page of the “wizard” (perhaps it would be more appropriate to rename them “drongo” because that’s who they’re for, and that’s what they’re like, but I digress) would throw an “Unexpected Error” dialogue (/ME wonders what the expected errors are) and bail out. This would leave an icon in the dialups window, but it would do nothing when clicked on, and disappear if you refreshed the window. At an inconvenient point, I shut down the LOB application (“Capable”) and rebooted the machine. Lo! For there were now doz...

That meets my definition of “frozen”; the implication is that doing a URPMI update from Cooker now will get you a copy of Mandriva 2006. The steps to follow (from, say, 10.1 or 10.2/LE2005) are: urpmi.removemedia -a [removes all URPMI sources, but you can be more selective] urpmi.addmedia --distrib rsync://rsync.planetmirror.com/mandrake-devel/cooker/i586/ urpmi --auto-select If you don’t want to smash your Internet link flat during the upgrade (typically several hours for a megabit link depending on what you’ve got installed), add an option like “--limit-rate 40k”. URPMI will update itself and all of its dependencies (RPM, glibc etc), then restart itself and do the rest. On a reasonably full 10.2/LE2005 system, it’s likely that there will be somewhere between two and a dozen dependencies that don’t self-untangle, and it’s also likely that most or all of these will self-untangle if you simply re-run the last URPMI command a couple...

Tracking World Solar Challenge vehicles .

It seems that Peru has eaten the whole enchilada, not just declaring for Open Source, but for Free software in particular . Hooraw! Which half-dozen countries still haven’t yet chosen the light side of the software Force? Meme time. I’d rather be a .so, but bbspot says no, we don’t even believe in .so: Which File Extension are You? And the quiz below it: Which OS are You? I have a step-brother?

This is a bit of a jaw-dropper: It’s a sad day and a good day. For years I’ve held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 thru 5.0, and was one of the people that designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I’ve been happy. Emphasis mine. He’s not scared of showstopper titles, either: “IE is a ghetto” and so on.

Read this . Mr Flint’s delicate little fingerprints are all over this one. I will never be able to view the Pantheon in quite the same way again. There’s a list of free online books here . I’ve read and recommend On Basilisk Station , Changer of Worlds and 1632 , but almost anything from Weber , Flint or Drake will be readable. If you like Pyramid Scheme, try Rats, Bats and Vats .

...I certainly blinked when I read “Petrol prices not high enough” , in this day and age of “shall I buy a tank of juice or an eighty gigabyte hard drive?” Your point about the wildlife is certainly true. One of the things I notice about cycling is that even with big noisy mtb tyres, a bicycle on bitumen, cement or stone is quiet enough that you see things missed even by the pedestrians, and sometimes your steady motion makes things more visible (or less alarmed) than the more rhythmic gait of a walker. Admittedly, not everyone wants to see a dugite when they’re out walking (which happened to me a few days ago) but OTOH I’d rather see it from a fast-moving bike on which I can draw my feet up than from Shanks’s Pony. I’ve also ghosted past a lass photographing a bird with her camera on a tripod, and neither photographer nor subject flinched even slightly. OTOH I’ve also ghosted past another daydreaming lass who abruptly flung her milk...

...are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.” — so spake Henry Spencer’s sig, in 1987. And here we are, eighteen years later, and everybody’s favourite blame-server finally gets around to beginning the process . And I quote from Page 2: A newcomer to the Windows group, [Corporate Vice President, Windows Core Operating System Development] Mr. [Amitabh] Srivastava had his team draw up a map of how Windows’ pieces fit together. It was 8 feet tall and 11 feet wide and looked like a haphazard train map with hundreds of tracks crisscrossing each other. That was just the opposite of how Microsoft’s new rivals worked. Google and others developed test versions of software and shipped them over the Internet. The best of the programs from rivals were like Lego[®] blocks — they had a single function and were designed to be connected onto a larger whole. Google and even Microsoft’s own MSN online unit could quickly respond to changes in the way peopl...

...can do dual-head, it seems. Video on one screen, glxgears at 120fps on the other. Kayewel! The only bug is that GL stuff doesn’t display on the external screen, but I can live with that.

I have no idea where Jason PB got that idea from. A homosexual could only be excluded from natural reproduction by being exclusively homosexual. And once you get to tubing babies, the whole sexual orientation thing goes out the window anyway, except that (so far) you need a host mother for life support between conception and birth. Having met several Catholic priests, and also Jason, I’d guess he would probably do a pretty reasonable job of the actual mechanics of priesthood, but I’d also guess that he has no real interest in doing so. As to the hands-in-air screams of accusation, read the freakin’ post! I said I don’t know which way it would fall, and I also said that “conventional wisdom” by which if you want it unpacked a bit I intend to mean “this is the gist of the opinions that I have most often heard expressed” would tend to disfavour homosexuals ( not that I would tend to disfavour homosexuals). Jason, neither the first stateme...

Require a HELO and reject (at SMTP time) attempts to send without a HELO are not explicitly logged, only the connect/disconnect without anything happening in between. Taking that to imply a no-HELO conversation, my server has seen ~72,000 unique conversations in the last 7 weeks, of which a mere 28 fall into this category. Not much love there, but I have no idea how many spammers try HELOless connections first then retry with a HELO on error, and it forces the caller to pass the next hurdle. The next hurdle is to refuse HELOs claiming to be 127.0.0.1, localhost, localhost.localdomain, any of your external addresses or their reverse-DNS names, or any of your MX names. This doesn”t require any magic technology, the PostFix config for it is: smtpd_helo_required = yes smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname, check_helo_access hash:/etc/postfix/helo_access, reject_non_fqdn_hostname, permit The file simply contains a list of unloved hosts accompanied by the wor...

Gotta love the Internet community for rapid response. Thanks, Chris Samuel, for this link to a War on Error campaign . It’s kind of interesting to see the parallels here. Dr Karl stops thinking too soon on several topics, trying for the short, dramatic, decisive answer instead of diligently seeking completeness — this matches so many “anti-terror” advisers perfectly (and no, I wouldn’t mind a bit if he wasn’t claiming authority). Adam, in turn, parallels the media efforts to legitimise many of the sanctions we’re told are necessary to win the “War on Terror”. As if it can be won by further polarising the issues. Finally, while the topics clearly run in parallel, the article doesn’t use the word “errorism” so I think James is still the discoverer of Errorism and Simon is its father. The thing which freaks me out about the “War on Terror” is that it so closely parallels Tomás de Torquemada’s ...

My hopes rose when I stumbled across the headline for this article (minor irony: served by PHP on Apache), but alas, they’re only talking about as-in-beer software from the copyright enforcers designed to scan for illegally copied media files and software. We all know how well that typically works. OTOH, free (as in speech) software really does target piracy. Many software companies long ago slipped over the line dividing profit from profiteering, but when there’s real Free competition around, they either have to drop their prices to something reasonable (which decreases illegal copying), or add whiz-bang features (like what? “Type What I'm Thinking?”) — and meanwhile people who can’t afford the profiteers’ software can get by with the Free stuff for things like reading and writing documents and data produced by the extortionware. I think that it’s high time for some of the Free Software organisations to start an anti-“piracy...

Good call, possibly brilliant call by James Dumay on Simon Rumble’s apparent typoe . “Errorism” — falsely accusing people of terrorism — is a word which fits a purpose well, and needs to be used and spread. I think the definition needs to be spread a little, though, to include any misguided action taken “against terrorism”.

Dear Jason , Please read the whole article, and not just the bit that pushes your buttons. It’s an ongoing situation, that is, if they abandon one of the qualifications (e.g. hit the bottle, break up with their one wife or add another wife (or husband) to the mix, whatever) they’re supposed to abandon the post. Unless you want to get all legalist about it, stuff like using Ecstasy would disqualify them as well, even though — for some funny reason — it’s not explicitly mentioned there. Your comment does highlight a potentially contentious point, though. As I read it, the directive speaks against homosexuals becoming ordained, but doesn’t speak to homosexuals who are already ordained. Given Ratzinger’s direction, I would expect that either the latter is silently implied (seems likely from the “we will resign” responses), or will be addressed after the hubbub from the first round has abated. Turning to the issue of bisexuals to ensure ...

James Dumay and Pia Waugh both took exception to the Roman Catholic Church planning to ban homosexuals from being priests . I just know I’m going to get flamed six ways from Sunday after this one, but the combination of a straight femme and bent BEM condemning the same thing and both of them and the offending news report missing the major points is too much to resist. First off, the big problem is the requirement that priests be celibate. That’s a recipe for disaster right there — and it has no foundation at all in the book which supposedly founded this great political organisation, which says (and I quote from 2 Timothy chapter 3, emphases mine): [A church’s] overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife , temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with...

So here we have Microsoft-funded “ Citizens Against Government Waste ” (CAGW) heavily criticising Massachusetts’s switch to an internationally accepted and open document standard (not open source, open standard — but I seem to remember a large monopolist who frequently confuses the two when it suits them). I remember CAGW, they were the organisation who had dead people writing in to support Microsoft in court a few years ago — thanks to sbergman27 for the link — is this “the dead hand of CAGW” at work again? Let’s follow the money and find out. Who stands to lose the most money and control if Massachusetts switches to an unencumbered document format? Big surprise, it’s CAGW sponsor Microsoft, through their dominant MS-Office suite. Why did CAGW list Microsoft’s suite last, after two other much-less-dominant examples which are waning anyway? If you’re inclined to wallow in additional irony, consider that at leas...

Y’all who dabble in electronics may have wondered whether those little green PS/2 adapters supplied with USB mice (and sometimes keyboards) have any electronics inside them or whether the smarts was all inside the mouse. Mr Hacksaw and I had a brief chat with one today, and the answer us an unqualified “no”. The smarts are definitely elsewhere. Here’s the connection diagram, should you ever want one:

Here’s what the first input screen looks like. Scaling has eliminated most of the horrible moire effects from our el cheapo 68cm TV (many thanks to R & I Electronics for that one, it’s been good to us so far). The next step was doing surgery on the video cable and two of the USB ports to allow it to talk to a flatscreen and small keyboard (ex Peter Lingley Electronics ) and coruscating mouse (ex BigW), the sync being untangled courtesy of a neat little $6 chip called an LM1881 from the ever-useful WorldWide Electronics . I’ll dig out, process and post some pictures tomorrow.

As part of chipping up an XboX to be an information kiosk, I need a small, black, optical and USB mouse to go with the black flatscreen, black keyboard, black XboX, black cables and presumably black cabinet. And none of my usual suspects had suitable mice. They were all either out of stock or asking stupid amounts of money for them. I finally found a small black optical USB mouse in Big W’s stationery deparetment for $24. It has a set of coloured LEDs inside it, which it cycles through gradually at random. <sarcasm>That is so necessary,</sarcasm> but OTOH it’ll attract the kids. Whether that’s a good thing or not, time will tell.

And I quote : Any half-decent email program can handle APOP [...] Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express don’t [...] This means you will have to use a different email program if you wish to take advantage of this service. Please see our Security section for reasons why we do not and will not support any version of Outlook. Although newer versions are more secure, the use of any version of Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express is strictly forbidden on the network due to concerns over security and virus infections: virtually all the viruses detected and stopped by our mail server take advantage of so-called ‘features’ in this application – so by not installing it, we greatly reduce the risk of virus infection . Emphasis in the original, my ellipses indicate snippage. Thanks to Ian Lynch for the link.

Pia, as many others have noted, Pia Waugh asks: Why is it that older, heterosexual, Christian, married, white males, who probably only make up ~16% of our totaly population are making the decisions for all of us? So much for representative politics Lots of reasons. Taking those in order: very few younger people give a damn about politics, many of them (for very good reason) regarding it as a lost cause; of those who give a damn, very few are experienced or sustainedly determined enough to have a significant effect, let alone chance of getting elected; the number of exclusively homosexual people in Western society is vanishingly small; the highest figure I’ve ever seen quoted is around ten percent — clearly a furphy, have a look at the people behind that one — the real number is probably between 0.1% and 1% depending on which tallying agency you believe; they do in fact get disproportionate representation both through making more noise and through working in useful pos...

...is really, really simple and would be even simpler if Canada is disqualified because I was exported from there at age 2. create your own visited countries map

Pushing your fuel purchases aside for one day isn’t going to have any impact on the oil companies (although, amongst the laughter, you might hear impassioned cries of “Oh, please , Brer Fox...”). If you’re serious about doing them damage, start walking to places instead of driving, then buy yourself a deadly treadley and ride to places that are an unreasonably long walk. Then send emails to all of your mates explaining that unlike the previous recommendation this will actually work, keep working in the long term, improve their figure into the bargain, save them money, boost their sex life (through being stronger, fitter and more agile) and help them to meet people if they have no sex life. IOW, it’ll help them to do everything that 90% of their email is (and apparently always will be) constantly urging them to do. The straw that crushed this camel was getting a no-fuel-day email from a lass (my favourite random) who has no car . Lead by example? “I di...

It looks like the farming rellies are starting to bite some bullets. Big chunks of the main farm are now slated to be planted out with Tasmanian Blue Weeds Gums, and Uncle Ted is putting the smaller block of his two-block property up for sale. This is a tad annoying because that block contains our house (well, shell-of-house) and scores of established fruit and nut trees, but OTOH he’ll finally be able to rebuild a decent house, an event that he’s never quite been able to save up for (one disaster or another would always arise when he was on the brink of building) and will have some spare cash afterwards for a few of the luxuries he's never had. The 37-acre (150,000m 2 ) property is on the south face of the Porongurup Range National Park in the Lower Great Southern region (30km by road from Mount Barker , 45km from Albany ), and will sell for around AUD$8000 an acre, which works out to about AUD$2 per square meter. This compares more than favourably with any boring Pert...

My ISP, ArachNet, has been bought out (along with PerthIX) by another, AmNet. AmNet have their own fibre network and DSLAMs, and in fact are about to DSLAM my nearest exchange (Wanneroo) — which I’m a stone’s throw from, pretty much guaranteeing 8x1 and (when they turn on ADSL2 in a few months) 12x1Mb/s (which is slightly more than I can suck direct from the modem at the moment, since it only has a 10Mb/s ethernet interface). With ADSL2+ and Annex M I should be able to get about 20x3Mb/s. Hooraw! ISO images at five minutes a throw! One and two thirds floppy disks a second! «leap» «click» «fits chrome extensions to his modem»

One of the things I like about this time of the year. Some of these are three inches long — too large to fit in one bite painlessly — and very tasty.

Welcome to the City of Stirling, just north of the CBD in Perth, Western Australia. This area always reminds me of Prince Herbert’s dad explaining Castle Anthrax . Note bulky old mobile ’phone (Nokia 6250) to right of join for for scale. Yes, dammit, the camera is level. It’s just that nothing else in the frame is. Not even the brick wall is quite vertical. Note the 5-inch drop-off at left, and then a few slabs later we get the six-inch step-up in the frame above; getting through here on a racing bike at speed and without busting a rim would be an award-winning achievement. This is the section west of the Mitchell Freeway just below the Reid Highway, before you get turfed into the streets for the balance of the journey to the border with the City of Joondalup.

...then a client I did a little forensic investigation for decided that they didn’t want to pay AUD$9000 in software licenses plus AUD$5000 for a server, they’d rather have the existing software properly configured instead. So now I’m finishing a 4000-word article, analysing Pcap-dumps and at the same time rewiring an XboX to take standard USB plugs. What you’re looking at here is the recreation for tonight. «sigh». At least I stand to get paid for it all when the rubble stops bouncing.

Not going to identify either customer or consultants involved here, but... In the beginning, there was the Novell file server, and there was the MS-Windows 2000 MS-SQL Server, and there was the SomeRandomLinux Gateway server, and the happiness was general and the Delphi-based ADO-backed applications did download onto the MS-Windows workstations and run in their course. The gateway server became upgraded to RedHat 9, and there was much rejoicing, but the SendMail did remain. And then the Novell server was declared obsolete, and deemed in need of replacement, and so the Samba server was commissioned. And the SuSE flavour of Linux was duly chosen, of the ninth version, that migration from Novell might be sweet. The transition took place, and the network did run like a dog, and the file permissions did give suck, and the users were greatly offended and did seek to lay hands on the consultants. Much confusion arose amongst those consultants, and much assignment of blame, and much running to...

You know how I mentioned FOSTFLG’s back tyre having never shown any sign of stress? Well today it took one bullet thorn too many and now has a slow leak. Oh, well. Since I bought a replacement, all it means is that now I have to replace it tomorrow. Still, ’tis spooky to have it start crapping out basically the instant I mention how flawlessly it’s been performing. The new front tyre is as hard at 40PSI as the old one was at 50. I guess that this century has better tyre technology than last. Some years ago when I was postie for Mount Barker, I discovered that not only did made-in-China Cheng Shin brand tyres cost half as much as “brand name” tyres, they gripped better, lasted roughly three times as long and were less susceptible to punctures. I have no idea how well they perform at 160k since I only ever got the postie bike up to 100k (downhill, downwind, on smooth bitumen and lying flat along the tank, although others have done better , some of them rema...

I have a business peer currently resident in Canberra, who expects to change locations a fair few times over the next year or two. He’s looking for a reliable wireless ISP, or failing that a good ADSL provider that won’t fee him into the dust for changing lines often. If you can’t be bothered fighting blogspot for the right to reply to this post, email me to my name within the cyberknights.com.au domain.

Since I’d just bought a new set of black shoes and a new set of sneakers, I guess the FOSTFLG Beastie decided that it wanted some too. I stopped at the bottom of our street on my way home from a ride to have a quick glance at a garage sale. I toddled around the sale, then came back out to the front again and had a yarn with the proprietor, and towards the end of this, the front tube popped and released a lot of air around the valve, psssshooo, sending the tyre dead flat in about three seconds. Since the tyres on FOSTFLG are old and perished, I bought a new set and new tubes, then pulled the old one off, but I can’t see the hole. The air was definitely coming out from around the valve, not through it, and very quickly, but there’s not the obvious hole I expected, even after pumping it up a bit. I checked my recent patch very carefully, and that’s still nicely sealed all around. The new tyre is a Dunlop MTB design rather than an MTB-ish road tyre, and wants to be i...

I always find it faintly amusing when people compensate for lack of skill by throwing more horsepower at a problem . It happens a lot in the computer industry; people “solve” problems by nuking them, burying them under money. It’d be like replacing your car — or at least the entire engine bay — whenever a funny noise escaped the bonnet or it drove too slowly. I’ve had real-life practice at both ends of the stick. I currently drive an ageing Peugeot 505 sedan, which is gutless but has a moderately nice set of boots (Dunlop 205/65R15s) and great suspension. I put a “sports” car or hotrod into a kerb, traffic island or roundabout centre every few months based on the “if he can do that, so can I” reasoning, because the thing is a delight to drive and they have plenty of power but no clue. Grow up driving on dirt, I say, and the rest is easy. My first car was a Chrysler Centura with the 4l slant hemi 6 motor, which is the exact oppo...

Up to 18m wingtip to wingtip, says The Beeb . Nice birdie.

...“The Waugh Wedding ” would have been like if they’d been in a position to invite all of their friends. Phrases like “Ben Hur” and “cast of thousands” come to mind.

Wanneroo Markets disgorged this super-crinkly mandarine today. If there’s any method to Sympathetic Medicine’s madness, the visual similarity to the convolutions of the human brain mean that this is excellent brain food. Even in the very likely event that SM is generally barking up the wrong tree, the fruit inside is very tasty.

The question now has morphed into “which countries do not have a FOSS-friendly government policy?” Hurry, kids! Don’t be last!

I’ve been pedalling around for a while now, feeling much looser-muscled but otherwise not particularly fit or fast, but the weather here for the past few days has been random, cold and wet so I’ve not had dry weather and the time to get out and about occur simultaneously. Today, I made the time, replaced the brake shoes on the recently acquired $10 black beastie and took it for a short spin. It’s obviously built for someone much smaller than me, has a shorter pedal stroke, narrower gear spread and it’s very bent and rusty compared to the $10 FOSTFLG beastie, but it does go just fine. On the way back home, I faced short but a steep hill that I normally would have walked it up, and decided that since I was already rolling, I’d have a go at riding it up anyway and see how far I got, which happened to be all the way, not exactly effortlessly but certainly easily and without the traditional huffing and the leaden feeling in my legs. It was very pleasing. In othe...

Ah. That explains the silly railway signs threatening to confiscate your bag, thanks Tim. And I quote : There will be new offences for leaving baggage unattended at major transport hubs and the Government will legislate to allow officials to stop and search suspects. Great! Put your bag down, get thrown in clink? I feel so... free. That’s it, then. The terrorists have effectively won. They’re destroying our society, and without letting off a single angry bomb in Australia.

I donated blood today for the first time, at the Red Cross centre in Perth. It was pretty much painless; the tiny stab-sample that Nicole took for testing hurt more than the needle proper, and it was all over (insertion to withdrawal) in under ten minutes. In three months, I can do it again, and at that point I qualify to be hooked up to the fabulous platelet machine every 2-4 weeks. This draws a sample, centrifuges it, pulls out the platelets and plasma, and then puts the rest back in — so no loss of iron and so forth. Meanwhile, your heart will have been busy circulating stuff, so the next sample is almost 100% fresh. If a fat old bugger like me can survive this, maybe you can too? Judging by Jeff’s blog , he came within a whisker of needing some replacement circulatory fluid today — maybe you’re next? <G/D/R>

I’m glad to see LED projectors being built , to be made available to the public later this year. At EUR1000 for a relatively gutless projector, this generation won’t be so revolutionary despite being small and relatively cool-running, but sooner or later I’ll be able to bolt a silent CD-drive-sized box to my ceiling and have it throw a crisp 4096x3072 2m x 1.5m display on my wall instead of staring into the haunted fishbowl.

Nephew Callum’s eyes grew wide as he clambered into the van (alongside five other offspring or nephews), for there rested an XboX, still in its wrapper. ”Can we have a play on this, Uncle Leon?” “Nah, sorry, it’s my work one.” True story, much to the general dissapointment of the short people that day. I have one to turn into an information kiosk, and the little gremlins at Microsoft have been slaving away doing important stuff since I last looked — like making the sods non-flashable, so now I need to get a mod-chip in order to get it booting Linux. They also seem to have reverted from 10GB hard drives back to 8GB. Oh, well, if space becomes an issue, new 120GB drives are only eighty-odd bucks, retail. If you tossed the DVD drive, you could power another HDD, and once you’d booted Linux the 137MB limit would no longer apply, so you could drop a brace of larger drives in there. A 500Gb multi-protocol ethernet SANS (or 250MB RAID-1ed) for ~...

Reposted here mainly so I don’t have to try so hard to find it again next time I want it. To: 0xdeadbeef at substance.abuse.blackdown.org Subject: Under enough pressure, ravioli behaves as a gas. Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 11:43:20 -0500 From: glen mccready < glen at qnx.com > [snip forwards] There was still one aspect of the whole concept of a ravioli-loaded railgun type weapon which we, lolling about late on a weeknight, with only a few neurons randomly firing, could not resolve. Would a chunk of metal (can of ravioli) impacting another, larger, rest mass structure (star destroyer) produce an “explosion” effect, or simply punch an appropriately shaped hole as it passed through? Bill? What am I, the neighborhood blast physicist??? Well, maybe. . . :-) It all depends on speed of impact versus the speed of sound in the target (what is called the Mach number, where Mach 1 means the speed of sound, Mach 2 is twice the speed of sound, etc), and the speed of ...

The sea-monster’s humps oscillate as it progresses, and it shares space with a spouting whale and a three-masted square-rigger. There’s also a shark, which turns any fish overlapping its teeth into a spreading red cloud, plus larger and smaller fish than you see here. And the seaweed waves. Like I said, waaaay too much free time. It’s called ASCIIquarium and is written in PERL.

Donna Benjamin was kind enough to forward a message from the Australian Copyright Council, which mentions the following items: The AUSFTA requires the following amendments to the Copyright Act: Hands up anyone who can’t see a bad moon rising? - sanctions against the manufacture and supply of devices designed to circumvent TPMs that control access (whether or not that access control is for the purposes of inhibiting or preventing infringement); In other words, just add some access control to your product — ANY access control, no matter how pathetic — and you can start suing your customers when they “circumvent” it. Fabulous. - replacement of the “permitted purposes” for which a circumvention device or service may be supplied with more limited exceptions; and Translation: throw any hopes of reverse engineering into the bin. - introduction of a procedure under which a person may be allowed to circumvent a TPM in order to make non-infringing uses o...

NASA are pleased to report that Enceladus only has an atmosphere near its south pole . Picture the space tourists of the future: “We can’t possibly stay in Dunyazad! The place has absolutely no atmosphere!” Once again, truth is stranger than fiction. Another mind-boggling aspect of the reports echoing after Cassini most recently blazed a trail past Enceladus is the conclusion that the surface near the south pole may be as little as ten years old . No, not ten million. No, not even ten thousand. The scientists discussing this put a 1,000 year ceiling on it and said “When ice comes out of the ‘hot’ cracks, or “tiger stripes,’ at the south pole, it forms as fresh, crystalline ice. As the ice near the poles remains cold and undisturbed, it ages and converts to amorphous ice. Since this process is believed to take place over decades or less, the tiger stripes must be very young.” Gotta love science. Never a dull moment. (-:

KMart currently have a special on two different kinds of bike, an orange one with shock absorbing suspension for both wheels for $130, and a charcoal grey one with front shocks only and a more robust-looking frame, called a “Kicker” and made in China for $180 (marked down from $250). I’m wondering if y’all know anything about these bikes, and whether they’re a bargain buy for a low-end “real” MTB or would be a constant source of disappointment. If it makes any difference, the box says “distributed by Bicycle Authority P/L, Sperry Drive, Tullamarine”, Vic and “Pacific Cycle” Madison, Wisconsin. The nett mass is 14kg and the model number is R2642KMI (I presume that the 26 relates to the rim size).

...with our second vehicle also acquired for the princely sum of roughly two sets of standard (ie non-MTB) brake pads. Now I have a backup in case the FOSTFLG Beastie decides to chuck a sad, and something for a guest to ride around the invitingly smooth and clear cycleways at the bottom of our street. I noticed today that — ironically enough — FOSTFLG was originally sold in Canberra (where I had to leave the Blue Beastie) by The Bycycle Warehouse. Muchas gracias also to Steve Hanley for his pointers to much info on “quill stems” and the like which are what the odd sliced-bean handlebar attachment mechanism is called. I’m now doing enough cycling that it’s impacting my driving. I find myself picking routes when I drive that follow the contours rather than routes that involve the least turns.

Here , we discover that “Adam Jansen, a digital archivist for the state of Washington [...] and his IT team completed a three-year [USD$1.5M] project to create an open-systems-based archive management center for the state of Washington”. So far so good. But then we discover that “Washington spent US$1 million more on a joint development project with Microsoft, which is helping the state create what it hopes will become an open format” — the glinga-a-ling-a-ling of alarm bells start sounding — and “Jansen says he is considering using Microsoft’s Office 12 and its new XML-based file format as a standard archiving format in the future”. OK, so how many joint development programs has Microsoft run? And how many of them have resulted in truly open standards, vs how many of them have wound up either with a patent millstone around their necks, delayed until they’re obsolescent, or “adopted” and violated? Consider that righ...

This moron reckons that an elm vulnerability is a serious problem for Linux. Let’s think about this for a moment: I have never used elm, nor come across a system on which it is in use. At all. I do not read email as root; nor do I know of other sysadmins who routinely do this. With any email client. Linux is dead easy to update in comparison with MS-Windows, my systems were all updated before this vulnerability was announced. Conclusion? Matthew Broersma fundamentally misunderstands or misrepresents the systems he’s speaking so authoritatively about. This is not MS-Outlook on MS-Windows we’re dealing with here, where every email is a potential booby-trap and running a monocultural virus flypaper as Administrator is common — in some cases even necessary — amongst sysadmins. Matthew also doesn’t mention (in an article entitled “Linux/Unix e-mail flaw...”, no less) that the MPlayer vulnerability is not a Linux/Unix problem. Is that article...